BOMBAY NOIR

Vikram Chandra’s gangster epic.

In Vikram Chandra’s new novel, “Sacred Games” (HarperCollins; $27.95), Ganesh Gaitonde, a sort of Bombay Al Capone, expresses his contempt for the English-speaking classes, people oblivious of the rampant criminality underpinning their serene existence: “These Englishwallahs were always superior, as if the world they lived in was some other one, far from my barrack, my streets, my home.” Describing the exploits of Gaitonde and his determined pursuer, Sartaj Singh, a Bombay cop, Chandra’s intensely ambitious nine-hundred-page work seems, at times, an attempt to make amends for the ignorance of Englishwallahs. Gaitonde not only relishes murder and destruction but also dabbles in filmmaking, works closely with Indian intelligence, and gets involved in a Hindu extremist plan to detonate a nuclear bomb in Bombay and provoke India into a suicidal war with Pakistan. Few pages go by in “Sacred Games” without a reminder that “the world is shot through with crime, riddled with it, rotted by it,” or, as Gaitonde’s spiritual adviser, Guru-ji, puts it, “Life feeds on life, Ganesh. And the beginning of life is violence.”

This violence takes explicit form in many scenes of torture and murder. Englishwallahs may be discomfited to learn that “the sound of a finger breaking is not very large, but it is dry, sharper than you expect. It is a quick, creaky sound, a small firecracker bursting.” Chandra’s stylish, worldly prose attains a Tarantinoesque rapture when it describes Gaitonde severing an arm with a sword, slashing at a human eye with a razor blade, or burning, in an “elegant way,” a slum: “There is the crisp tinkle of glass and the small sparking flares now bloom into flowing rivers that run smoothly across rooftops, down walls, into windows. The fire speaks now, it makes a joyous, throaty grumbling as it eats, there is no stopping it.”

In the interconnected stories of “Love and Longing in Bombay” (1997), Chandra gracefully evoked a city of immense struggles, dreams, and pain. In “Sacred Games,” that city, dominated by megalomaniacal criminals and corrupt cops, has put on much “resplendent and rotting flesh.” But then Bombay itself has transformed rapidly in the past decade and a half—a period during which the city’s official name was changed to Mumbai—as India’s religious and political conflicts have finally caught up with the city’s traditionally business-minded and cosmopolitan communities. In December, 1992, during the nationwide riots that followed the demolition of a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu nationalists, hundreds of people in Bombay, mostly Muslims, were killed; retaliatory bomb attacks, allegedly masterminded by a Muslim don living in Dubai, killed nearly three hundred people, creating religious tensions among the hitherto secular fraternity of criminals. Though Bombay has prospered greatly from the liberalization of India’s state-controlled economy in the nineteen-nineties, it has also become home to feral forms of capitalism. In recent years, a series of scandals and scams have exposed an intricate network of greed, envy, and lust which binds politicians, tycoons, and civil servants to Mafia dons, Bollywood stars, and slumlords.

Such material—with its prodigies of arcane socioeconomic detail and suggestions of disorder—might appear overwhelming to a novelist. But Chandra, who grew up in Bombay and who now teaches creative writing at Berkeley, mines it confidently. Sartaj and Gaitonde, pursuing their separate destinies across Bombay, happen upon an extraordinarily diverse sampling of humanity—from an aspiring Muslim fashion model from provincial India who ends up as Gaitonde’s mistress to a militant Maoist who turns into an armed robber. More ardently than most recent chroniclers of India’s most hectic metropolis, Chandra embraces the vitality as well as the vulgarity of the millions chasing the “big dream of Bombay”: the “boys and girls who had come from dusty villages and now looked down at you from the hoardings, beautiful and unreal.” Chandra delights in the profanity of Bombay street talk, which he renders in a hard, garish vocabulary, often composed of as many untranslated Hindi words as English ones. Non-Indian readers of “Sacred Games” may be frustrated by what can seem a research-heavy attempt at authenticity. But Chandra seems determined to show how his characters, particularly Gaitonde, define and savor their identities through speech. Here is Gaitonde describing the improvisations of his gang:

They learned the language, and then the walk, and they pretended to be something, and then they became it. And so for American dollars, we said choklete, not Dalda like the rest of our world; for British pounds, lalten, not peetal; for heroin and brown sugar, gulal, not atta; for police, Iftekar, not nau-number; a job gone wrong was ghanta, not fachchad; and a girl so impossibly ripe and round and tight that it hurt to look at her was not a chabbis, but a churi.

Chandra shares generously his knowledge about how criminals living in luxurious hideaways in Dubai and Thailand control the films made in Bombay’s studios—the novel is replete with many such details of our globalized world. A schoolboyish romance with James Bond-like heroes lingers in his descriptions of spies and spooks: “K.D. feels always that he is sitting at a node in a web, at the intersection of globe-spanning lines of energy that hum and spin and change shape. He can strum a thread here, and ten thousand miles away a man will slump in a doorway.” He frequently digresses in order to visit the great landmarks of India’s post-colonial history: the violence of Partition, in 1947, Communist insurgencies, drug- and gunrunning scandals, and the rise of religious extremism and terrorism. Endlessly, even alarmingly, fecund—the book contains four “insets,” or backstories of peripheral characters, amounting to nearly one-sixth of the whole—Chandra is clearly inspired by the Hindu-Buddhist mandala, a symbolic representation of the cosmos in colored sand, which Sartaj, not uncoincidentally, watches being drawn by Tibetan monks on a Bombay street. As in a typical, multipanelled mandala, “Sacred Games” offers many stories simultaneously, while allowing us to gaze separately at each life in its own moment of being.

No figure in the novel’s intricate design, however, provides greater pleasure than Sartaj, the Sikh cop in pursuit of Gaitonde. “Past forty, a divorced police inspector with middling professional prospects,” and orbiting uneasily close to a “vast constellation of ambition and wealth and power,” Sartaj seems initially built from the conventions of the L.A. detective novel. But he achieves a gruff attractiveness all his own as Chandra describes his trawls through Bombay’s seething streets and shantytowns, his melancholy solitude, his muted romanticism, and his “senseless, embarrassing idealism,” which is often challenged by the “aged-and-cured wickedness of the city, its piquant scandals, its bitter breakdowns, its ferociously musty unfairness.” So deeply does Chandra immerse him in the swarm of the quotidian—the “enormous bustle of millions on the move, the hurtling local trains with thick clusters of bodies hanging precariously from the doors, the sonorous tramp and hum of the crowd inside the tall hall of Churchgate Station”—that saving Bombay from nuclear holocaust appears to be all in a day’s work.

Loving his characters equally, Chandra endows many of them with an unexpected dignity: Sartaj’s partner, a compromised figure who manhandles suspects and takes bribes, returns home to a full and happy family life. Chandra’s genial mood of acceptance seems part of a Hindu vision of human affairs as leela, or sacred game, which transcends easy distinctions between good and evil—a world view that both major and minor characters in the novel, spies and cops as well as criminals, magnify. As the Indian intelligence officer who recruits Gaitonde in the fight against Islamist terrorism puts it:

To play this game well, you had to handle bad men, you had to have them do bad things which were finally good things. It was necessary. Only those who had never been on a real battlefield asked for unstained virtue and unblemished deeds. On the field, all actions were only provisionally moral, and the game was eternal.

Playing the endless games of the Cold War, the characters of John le Carré’s novels didn’t think much differently, but Chandra is after something bigger. He has spoken in interviews of the possibility of taking the novel beyond the modern Western conceptions that have defined it, such as of the bourgeois individual who seeks self-knowledge and strives to establish his moral worth before his peers in a historically circumscribed society. Chandra believes that many Indians, pulled between tradition and modernity in a chaotically populous and poor country, have a less psychologically inhibited sense of self and a mythic, rather than a historical, sense of their place in the world.

The philosophical ambition of “Sacred Games” owes much to Bollywood films. To Chandra, these seem to capture the flexible nature of non-bourgeois self-perceptions, moving as they do from documentary naturalism to an epic mode of storytelling without getting bogged down in psychological realism. Dropping his characters into the tumult of recent national history, he occasionally seems to adopt a more conventional mode of novel-writing about India. But his stance, unlike Salman Rushdie’s or Rohinton Mistry’s, is of a calm Homeric objectivity, as he tries to realize afresh what seems, after many long novels from the subcontinent, a particularly Indian ambition to retool the novel as an epic form.

Certainly, Gaitonde, the only character to be accorded first-person narration, displays self-regard on an epic scale as he describes his bloody rise to power, his ill-fated marriage, and his doomed attempts to be loved by his mistress. Gorging on a sense of power and control—he orders an assassination in London as coolly as he summons Bollywood starlets to his yacht in Thailand—he resembles the Hydra-headed demons in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. His anxiety about his small penis, which exposes him to quack remedies on the Internet, sounds a bit bourgeois; but the quality of his self-delusion approaches the monstrous. A few pages after raping a boy in prison, he announces that he “grew more quietly reflective, more interested in the world.”

It is clear from early in his narration that Gaitonde suffers from a fractured identity of the kind that makes Tony Soprano seek out a psychotherapist. There is, however, no Jennifer Melfi figure here to provide him—or the reader—temporary relief from his psychoses (unless we count Guru-ji, whose advice that Gaitonde should accrue spiritual potency by sleeping with virgins, for instance, does not seem especially useful). Lurching from cruelty to sentimentality and naïve boastfulness over hundreds of pages, Gaitonde threatens to turn into a bore; Chandra’s decision to endow him with an excess of epic self-consciousness rather than the bourgeois capacity for self-examination seems risky in a novel of this length. In any case, the real subject of Chandra’s book—the small but heroic struggles of the human spirit against the mundane—seems to lie not so much in Gaitonde’s story as in Sartaj’s, or in the fleeting scenes of heartbreak and despair that hover above and under the main narrative. There is a moment, for example, in one of the long insets which describes Sartaj’s mother as a young woman in pre-Partition India:

Prabhjot Kaur saw how Ram Pari and her children were making their home. They had bundles, none of which Prabhjot Kaur could remember seeing during the long day, but from these bundles they now pulled sheets and rags, strips and tatters, which, arranged on the ground close to the house in a rough, jagged circle, became a habitation. Prabhjot Kaur saw how the shadow of a wall alone could be a shelter. She went to sleep filled to the brim with this new knowledge. She remembered all the drawings she had made of “My Home” in her long life, and now she knew that all those simple boxy houses she had drawn were somehow a lie.

There are few such moments of self-reckoning and revelation in “Sacred Games,” which seems to abide too easily, even zestfully, in degradation and depravity. Travelling around India toward the end of his life, Gaitonde is exposed to its grotesque new contradictions: “We met farmers who carried mobile phones and murdered their daughters and sons for marrying out of caste, we bought bottles of mineral water from scabby, barefooted chokras whose arms were covered with ringworm.” But the tone of moral inquiry, incongruously voiced by Gaitonde, who is as serenely homicidal as ever, comes too late in the book.

By then, Chandra is spending most of his narrative’s energy trying to make his reader believe in the threat of a nuclear bomb going off in Bombay. Gaitonde imagines the “crawling ants’ nest of a city eaten by fire, all of it crumpled and black and twisting and finally gone.” He says, “I knew that what men can imagine, they can make real. And so I was terrified.” As fear of atrocity quickens the novel’s last pages, Chandra appears to have realized his ambition to seduce and hold the reader with the sheer power of storytelling. Even the novel’s somewhat predictable happy ending reveals the over-all pattern of the book to be as “hypnotically complex” as the mandala that Sartaj observes.

Yet this triumph feels minor. For we expect from literary novels with large claims on our time satisfactions much deeper than those regularly available at the movies; and the elaborately contrived plot of “Sacred Games” seems finally to offer a vision no more compelling than the romantic brutality and cynicism of hardboiled crime fiction. Chandra’s moral imagination seems too much in thrall to the kind of sensationalist fantasy underpinning disaster movies that manipulate terror in an age obsessed with terror—the fantasy that, as Susan Sontag defined it in her essay “The Imagination of Disaster,” helps many people to cope with the twin threat of “unremitting banality and inconceivable terror” by offering “an escape into exotic, dangerous situations which have last-minute happy endings.” Unlike those novelists who have much to say but lack the necessary craft, Chandra seems to be able to do anything. His violent naturalism superbly renders the disorder of the contemporary world. Yet it is unable to transcend an equally pervasive intellectual and spiritual complacency. Conceived on a grand scale, “Sacred Games” leads us to expect more than self-sufficient virtuosity from a writer who possesses the rare, prodigious power to make literature. ♦